Will Alice be weird in Wonderland?

Will Alice be weird in Wonderland?

Will Alice be weird in Wonderland?

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Christopher Wheeldon leads his Morphoses dance company

Art of the abstract: Christopher Wheeldon leads his Morphoses dance company by example in rehearsal for Commedia in New York

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Mayerling, by Kenneth MacMillan

Challenging: Mayerling, by Kenneth MacMillan, the master of dark drama, returns to Covent Garden in the autumn

Art of the abstract: Christopher Wheeldon leads his Morphoses dance company by example in rehearsal for Commedia in New York

From the Royal Ballet's historic Cuban tour last week leaked out surprise news of plans for the first full-length story ballet to be made at Covent Garden in 15 years.

Christopher Wheeldon, a 36-year-old Brit and the world's most sought-after ballet choreographer, will be creating a ballet based on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for 2011.

It's been a long wait, while complaints mounted that, despite the Royal Ballet's luxuriant subsidies, the company has preferred for years to spend millions on restaging classics to commissioning new work.

The hope is that Wheeldon will be allowed to make more of this opportunity than turn Alice into a tame children's Christmas ballet.

Long after its 1865 publication, the strange tale has been reassessed as darker and more adult material, especially when put into the context of the author's obsession with the little girl who lived near him in Oxford.

In the past, such relationships appeared quite innocent but the more sinister shades of the Alice story in modern eyes have prompted disturbing plays and films by Dennis Potter, Jonathan Miller and others.

The enigmatic Charles Dodgson (Carroll's real name) has even been accused of paedophilia.

Such a subject might once have been explored psychologically by the Royal Ballet's master of drama, Sir Kenneth MacMillan.

Since his death in 1992 it has become clear that few choreographers today can delve into the heart's secrets with the same compelling truth that he could find, and with as richly inventive dance movement.

MacMillan always refused to see ballet as a sweet, pretty stage art. He used incest, rape and the Holocaust as some of his subjects.

The memorable lead characters of two of his most successful ballets, Manon and Mayerling, come to sticky ends due to their own failings: Manon, the good-time girl who chooses money rather than love, and Crown Prince Rudolf, who engineers a grisly, drug-and-sex-fuelled suicide pact with his lover.

After MacMillan, balletic narrative retreated in scope and depth, and now not even the world of theatre takes ballet seriously as a dramatic stage form.

Outside Covent Garden, Matthew Bourne has tackled murderous tales such as The Car Man and Dorian Gray, while English National Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Northern Ballet Theatre in Leeds have all put big sums behind the public's craving for lush, sugary ballet spectacles such as Far from the Madding Crowd, Madam Butterfly or The Snow Queen.

However, all of these put story above steps, all aim straight for box-office appeal - none has the challenging, outrageous courage of MacMillan's ballets.

Last time Covent Garden asked for a full-length new ballet, it burned its fingers. In 1995, it boldly commissioned the energetic modern American choreographer Twyla Tharp - famous for Sixties radicalism, an affair with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Broadway musicals - to pull off a serious three-act ballet that would transfer to a new millennium.

The rococo, aphoristic Mr Worldly Wise did not have enough cohesive story to please the box office (despite star names that included Darcey Bussell and Irek Mukhamedov), a costly mistake that wrote off more than £200,000 in a few performances.

So no wonder Wheeldon has been so backward in coming forward. Formerly resident choreographer at the illustrious New York City Ballet, he is renowned as an "abstract" choreographer, creating dance inspired by music, not story.

He admits to long-time fear of following the giant MacMillan, who spotted his talent when he was a boy. "But I think that time has passed. I've been waiting, in a way, to have a little bit more experience, because it's a big undertaking."

Speaking between performances of his modern ballet company Morphoses in the US last week, he said that Alice has long preoccupied him.

In the 1990s English National Ballet recreated the story on the traditional lines of the picture-book Victorian girl having adventures with white rabbits and Mad Hatters. Wheeldon thinks things have moved on subtly.

"A lot can be read into Alice in Wonderland - one could take the more Freudian route," he says. "Lewis Carroll was a quiet, interesting man who struck up a strange friendship with this little girl, rather like JM Barrie did.

"Most biographers and writers agree there wasn't necessarily any darker subtext to that friendship, but it's still a very interesting topic, that a man would have this friendship with a child and photograph her naked.

"Having said all that, we want to be true to the Lewis Carroll novel, but in the context of a full-evening dance. I think the characters cry out for movement - it's a very physical story, which was what attracted me. On the other hand, I'm not doing it as a child-friendly work.

"Kids are more sophisticated these days - look at what they watch and read now: it's all vampires and magic and Harry Potter, themes which are in those old-fashioned fairytales but much more hidden."

Although most highly regarded for his abstract work, Wheeldon's back catalogue does also include narrative-driven works - A Midsummer Night's Dream, Carnival of the Animals and Eight (about two of Henry VIII's wives) - and his finest plotless pieces convey strong emotion with some male-female duets as heartbreaking as any Romeo and Juliet parting.

Still, balletic storytelling demands a skill for expressing character development and action that few abstract choreographers practise.

And yet audiences today are saturated with stories on TV, stage and cinema. How can ballet compete?

"Maybe there's too much story everywhere," Wheeldon says. "I blame film, TV and musical theatre at its biggest and brashest. Stories are being told using every dollar possible, every special effect possible, and so little is left to the imagination.

"That's why fewer people are going to the ballet. But I don't want to end up with just an overblown show with masses of scenery and Tenniel [Carroll's original illustrator] costumes moving about."

More details about the production pencilled in for 2011 will be confirmed next spring by the Royal Opera House, but Wheeldon reveals that his composer will be 38-year-old Joby Talbot (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The League of Gentlemen and ballet scores for Wayne McGregor), which implies easy listening.

"What is wonderful about Alice is that it flows in a rather magical and imaginative space," Wheeldon concludes.

"But there's a deep melancholy that pervades the story. Just looking at the photographs of that little girl, there's something a little bit sad about her."

Six stories that could be ballets

The best ballet plots are simple: a two-timing tragedy (Giselle), a "real" doll (Coppélia), lovers from different worlds (Swan Lake). Add a few big crowd dance set-pieces — and a villain, of course. So why not turn one of these contemporary stories into a ballet?

The Larry Sanders ShowAbout a vain but magnetic TV star and his self-inflicted fall. Villain: his Mephistophelean producer. Music: Italian opera and US TV themes.

Facebook, the BalletBased on a musical premiered at this year's Edinburgh Fringe: a couple of students create a woman on Facebook, who takes on a lethal life of her own. Villains: the students. Music: opera whiz-kid Thomas Adès.

Duck Moat Up-to-date Swan Lake with aristocratic MP lured to build follies by mysterious Speaker in black. Villain: the Speaker. Music: Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies, Master of the Queen's Musik, who has announced that he is writing a comic opera about the MPs' expenses scandal but who might be asked to change to a ballet score instead.